Cane Sugar - 601 Reviews

The year is 1998 and cucumber melon reigns supreme. It's everywhere from lotions to candles...okay that's pretty much the only places that you would find that combo, but I had a candle in my room that smelled like that, and one of my best friends always used the lotion so in my eyes (or nose) the scent was everywhere. Then suddenly it seemed to vanish. I recently found cucumber melon hand soap, but my ladyfriend said she didn't like the way it smelled, so it remained on the store's shelf. Now here I am sitting in the "Golden Girls" hotel in Las Vegas waiting while said ladyfriend packs up her things. I'm just sitting on the bed sipping this wonderful soda. Cucumber and melon are both two of my favorite flavors, so them together is a no brainer. If it were any other flavor I would not have dropped the money on a four pack, but I just couldn't say no to these old friends. I'm glad I couldn't.

This is essentially a Mr Q Cumber soda with some honeydew thrown in the mix. I can guarantee that 99% of the people who try this soda will be surprised by how much it actually tastes like both of it's flavors. It's uncanny. I love it. I know a certain sound engineer in Buffalo who will probably love it even more. He ordered three cases of Mr Q Cumber after I introduced it to him, and I bet he'll order three of these as well.

When a lemon winks in your direction it would be wise of you to pay attention. There is no telling what disaster may befall you if you chose to ignore it. Let's face it, lemons are bastards and you'll more than likely get a squirt of citric acid in your unsuspecting eye. No one wants that, well unless that is some weird fetish you have. I'm sure there is a community online for folks like you to meet up and ignore winking lemons. I'm just not a part of it.

As I've said in the past Hubert's makes fantastic lemonades. Nice and tart the way lemonade should be. Their raspberry half & half left a lot to be desired because the tea tasted watered down. They got things right with their peach line though. It starts off as a great tasting peach tea and it fades into nice sweet lemonade as it swishes across your tongue. The problem with the raspberry was that it tasted like raspberry lemonade with tea added to it. With this it seems more like a flavored tea mixed with regular lemonade and that certainly works much better for me.

So here I sit refreshed, with happy taste buds and clear vision. This is what reviewing beverages should always be like.

Hubert's makes lemonade that is to be reckoned with. It's the freshest tasting bottled lemonade I have ever tried. It's so tart and the little bits of lemon are an added bonus. When I saw that they started to make half & halfs I instantly bought a couple of flavors.

Unfortunately this drink didn't live up to their straight lemonades. It tastes like they look the base of one of their great raspberry lemonades and mixed it with a very watered down iced tea. There's no real tea taste and the mixture takes away from the lemonade. There is no longer any real tartness to it, a bummer indeed. I expected greatness, but what I got was blandness.

Hubert's lemonade/limeade doesn't mess around. You'd think with a slogan like "Only the Best Will Do" and a sour faced lemon on the bottle, they were trying to talk themselves up in order for you to ignore the mediocre liquid inside. Hubert's doesn't need to sink to such tactics. Every flavor I've had by them has been some of the best lemon/limeade I've ever tasted. And that sour faced lemon isn't an exaggeration, it's really tart! The cherry flavor in this really shines through as well, giving the sour limeade a literal 'cherry on top'. Good work Hubert's, keep making awesome lemonade and I'll keep buying it

Once a year some friends of ours host “Goth Beach Day.” It's really not as funny as you would think. No one gets dressed up or anything. It's really just a bunch of overly pale people with a lot of tattoos taking over the beach. The most goth attire present was probably the sleeveless Bauhaus shirt I wore, a parasail and our friend Derek wore a stripped shirt that made him look like Pugsley. I can safely say that our little group used more sunscreen than the rest of the beach combined.

Let it be known that I love the beach, but only at night. The sun and I have been at war with each other for the past 33 years. I lose more often than not. Basically at these outings most people are enjoying the sun and the water, while I'm miserable trying my hardest to not get sunburn (I got some on the top of my head and my hand, not too bad). I also spent my time sipping on this bottle of Lemonade. A company in my hometown of West Seneca makes it. They are best known for their apple cider and in the fall their mill is open to the public. It's magical. Going to a cider mill in the fall with the chilly weather would be a more fitting outing for this group. I should propose that. So yeah, they are starting to expand their line and have released a series of flavored lemonades. Tastily flavored lemonades at that. I generally find that large bottle flavored lemonades such as this are better when watered down a bit, but Mayer Bros got it perfect. It's not too sweet. Nor is it too tart. It's simply refreshing lemonade with a decent bit of strawberry flavoring to it. Both lemon and strawberries living in perfect harmony. It's the goth dream. Wait…€¦.whhaaaaaaaatttttt?

I've talked about this before, but energy drinks had really overrun our society. I have so many friends who can't sleep at night because of their intake, and then in the morning they feel like a filth bin, and they drink more energy drinks just to get through the day. It's a sad cycle that can be cleared up by some detox time in which people will feel like complete garbage for a while.

I luckily am not in this camp, but I feel a lesser version of it. I've been lucky that at any point in my life I've been able to fall asleep within five minutes of my head hitting a pillow. This past week things have been different. The little sleep I've been able to get has been complete crap. I wake up feeling terrible. I keep saying I just need to buy a new bed, as I've had mine forever, but secretly I think that my sensitivity to caffeine is getting worse. It used to be if I drank anything with caffeine after 5PM I wouldn't get to sleep until 3 or 4 in the morning. My 5PM cut off seems to be getting much earlier now. I'm not at a point where I need to drink an energy drink, or coffee every morning to get through the day without being miserable. I really hope that I never get to that point. I did feel it would be a wise idea to drink this Function before I went for a little hike with some friends, seeing as my sleep was limited and poor.

This doesn't really fall under the same category for me because it doesn't have the chemical garbage like taurine to give you energy, that makes you crash like a kamikaze. Instead this has the natural stimulus' caffeine, muira puama root extract, epimedium extract, guarana seed extract, catuaba bark extract and yerba mate leaf extract. It doesn't taste like a normal energy drink, which the bottle boasts, but I mourn. It also leaves you with less of a crash. That is something I can get behind. Flavor-wise it does have a tropical fruit juice flavor, but there are no individually distinct fruits in there. It just has a general tropical flavor mixed with a bit of the yerba mate flavor. Expecting more of a sports drink type flavor the yerba mate can be a bit off-putting, but when you know to expect it, it's welcomed.

When you've got it, you've got it. Tazo has it. This tea is a treat, a peach even. People don't really use that any more. Strange how a phrase just doesn't get used anymore, like some committee sat around and said, "Alright ladies and gentlemen. Today we will strike the words 'phat', 'boss', and 'cowabunga' from the American vernacular. Agree? Objections? No. Then it's settled. Let's go get a pizza." This tea is everything. It's perfect for what it is. It's sweet but not too sweet. It's bitter but not too bitter. It's a sweetened green tea that tastes like it should. Not to mention, it's not horrible in the calorie department. If this came in a 40 ounce bottle like malt liquor I would buy it and probably, with no restrictions, drink the whole thing. I don't live in the worst part of town, but if I find myself at the market across the street at, say, 9:30 in the morning, I see people buying 40s. I could now buy a 40 and drink with them. We could hang out. I could make friends with a 40 of this iced tea. Also, if the people who are buying these 40s are just thirsty for that much drink, they could save their livers and get this.

Tazo. Look at the picture I'm painting for you. Do you see all the work I'm doing for you? There is a demographic that you are missing: the early morning thirsty people. These people aren't alcoholics. They're just thirsty. You could sell so much of your drink to a new audience that you could open new factories and employ people. You could take the poor and give them jobs. Tazo! Are you listening to me? I'm having an epiphany. Do this. Make 40 ounces of pure, green tea bliss for everyone. Raining down from the skies like a needed rainstorm during an otherwise dry season, this could satisfy the masses. This tea could unite everyone.

Over the past couple of months I have been brewing gallon vats of tea, chilling it in my fridge and enjoying my own unsweetened iced teas. 99% of said tea has been green tea, and it feels like it's been forever since I just sat back and enjoyed a nice black tea. This Teas' Tea perfectly satiated my taste buds.

It tastes like a traditional southern sweet tea with some peaches thrown in the mix. It really is a nice refreshing change of pace when you can actually taste that a company uses cane sugar. It almost gives the drink it's own texture. There are subtle hints that it should be gritty, but without any actual grit at all. I could go for a slightly stronger peach taste in this, but the level that it is currently at is not a deal breaker by any means. The label says it's a “classic” and who am I to argue. With the heat and humidity that Buffalo has been having lately I feel like if I was out on my porch sipping this I could close my eyes and be transported to the backwoods of Georgia. Where I can only assure horrid things would happen from the stories my friends who used to live down there have told me.

Yesterday was the 4th of July and to celebrate in style I grilled up far too many veggie dogs/sausage. I suppose that doesn't differ from about half of the days in any given week in the summer. Perhaps I'm just that American all summer long.

Everyone knows that the most proper way to celebrate your country is to stuff your face with a bunch of hot dogs and wash it all down with orange soda (okay I started doing that in Canada, but it was only because I was trying to show how American I was in that foreign land). My dogs were almost done, so I went into the fridge to get my orange soda, only to realize that there was none in there. I had let America down. The closest that I had was with bottle of Elvira's Orange Scream. It's a creamsicle in soda form. It may have not been totally appropriate, but Elvira told me to make do with the situation, and who am I to argue with a woman carrying a chainsaw? She actually looks like she's about to take that chainsaw to an orange the size of a recliner. I hope she puts on proper eyewear before cutting into that, because the citrus mist it would produce would be hell on anyone's retinas.

So there I was midday just pounding veggie dogs with all the fixings (minus sprinkles, as I unfortunately was out of Bacos) and sipping on this soda. While it is still a creamsicle soda, the orange is much heavier than the cream, so that worked out well for me. I'd say that the ratio was at 75% orange soda to 25% cream, if the normal percentages for such soda were 50-50.

The celebration of America came and it went and I didn't light off a single firework. These are sad times. I ended up at some parade before the fireworks display and as old men handed out tiny flags all I would think of was when our alien overlords would run for office and their platform would be, “Abortions for some, miniature American flags for others!”

Summer time is getting closer and closer and to the South, that means one thing...I think. That thing is peaches. The South loves peaches. They put them in everything: salad, soup, drinks, desserts, and everything in-between. I think only snacks are in-between but you get it. Everything. They eat them every which way, too. Deep fried, au naturale, salted, sugared, grilled, sautèed, and pureed. They also juice them.

I feel like this drink is the closest I will get to a sweetened Peach tea, authentic sweet tea with authentic peaches. That's a nice change to the already perfect sweet tea. Even though this tea is made in New Jersey, I feel that some of the upper management, you know, the guys with the hats and giant cigars, were from the South. Imported to NJ from their homeland with the promise of jobs, money, home, chances, opportunity, etcetera. They certainly did find it, though. They found a company that tastes wonderful and also tastes like home. They found two simultaneously great things at the same time. Both Southerners and Northerners have to agree that is a wonderful thing. Bipartisan support!

There is so much sugar in everything. Everyone is getting so fat that Coke just made a "responsible" size so that people aren't just drinking giant, twenty ounce bottles all day. It's nuts. People should have the self control to know that enough is enough. Just because you have twenty ounces available, doesn't mean that you need to drink twenty ounces. I'm not calling you fat but I am saying that you should watch what you eat because you're getting a bit portly. That's nicer, right?

This is a step in the right direction. There are two servings but at thirty-five calories a service, I'll slam this whole bottle and not look back. All the walking around the office I do, I probably burned them up. Up and down the stairs and back and forth from one desk to another probably nixed those bad boys. Can you tell I know nothing about nutrition or fitness?

The tea itself is a simple, black tea. Lightly sweetened with no bite, but a clean, black tea. This is like a tea you could make at home. That simple. It's done well, though and you get the feeling that you're doing all right for yourself. This drink is the raise you earned for hard work. This drink is the A+ on that tough Economics 101 test you just did. This drink is the clean car you get after a car wash. It's a good feeling. This is good and I got it for a steal at a local discount store. Could I ask for more? I submit that I could not.

I don't know what it is with most of the part-timers at my job. Sometimes we get part time workers or interns that seem to have lived under a rock their whole life. They don't know anything about pop culture and the first month is spent discovering how far back in time you can go to discuss things they might have a clue about. I guess when I was twenty-two, I might have not known what lychee was, but when I described it as "it tastes like a fruity old woman," our intern gave me a face, and rightfully so.

He actually took a sip of this. He told me I was right and that's all I needed to hear from him. After drinking half this can, I've got to admit this is one of the better lychee drinks I've had. If they all tasted like this, I would not be as leery to drink them as I am. I don't know what it is but I've had some that are downright terrible. Potentially spoiled rotten. This is like a bouquet of flowers. I don't know what it is about lychee but it's like a fruity, flowery, sweet treat when done right. Someday I'll find a real one and eat it but in the meantime, this is a good place to start.

If Fosters is Australian for Beer, then Bundaberg is Australian for soda. Before this all I had tried was their ginger beer, but it was one of the best I have ever tasted. When we got a bottle shipped to us, it really knocked my socks off. Truth be told I really thought the company only made the one flavor until our friend Terry brought us back a bottle of guava soda and this bottle of burgundee creaming soda. I wasn't exactly sure what this was going to be but my money was on red cream soda. I was partly right. It is a cream soda style beverage that is reddish in color, but it wasn't quite like the Canadian red cream soda I was used to. A quick look at the ingredients list showed me that this was actually red grape cream soda (made with actual grape juice). I would have never have thought to mix grape juice and cream soda, but what do I know I'm from Western New York. Apparently in Australia it is a traditional drink. As soon as I read the ingredients I could pick out the grape in the flavor that I originally thought was some sort of berry. It really is a spectacular drink. I drank about half of the bottle while Mike and I were hanging out earlier, and thanks to the twist cap, I was able to save the rest for later. I must say it somehow tasted even better when I went back for seconds.

With a drink this good I can only imagine that kangaroos carry them around in their pouches and the only way to get one is to box it for a bottle. Watch out, or you may find yourself disemboweled. No one likes to be disemboweled, just like no one in Australia wants to be solely associated with kangaroos. Don't worry folks, from here on out whenever I hear the word Australia I will instantly think of your fantastic sodas.

Sometimes I wonder why we even review “shot” drinks. They all taste fairly bad by nature. There's always an underlying chemical-esque flavor to them. Sure they all have their specific purposes, but we do this site to talk about the way things taste, not really to discuss their functional merits.

This shot here tastes like chemical orange concentrate. Okay it's less chemically than other shots I've had, but the weird flavor is still there. That flavor is the obscene amounts of vitamins and minerals that are jammed into this 2.5oz of fluid. As far as shots go, it's not terrible, and the aftertaste doesn't last very long. I can't ever imagine sitting down and drinking a big glass of something that tasted like this though, it would be disgusting. So for a shot it's decent. In terms of a beverage it's gross. It's all about sacrificing flavor for functionality and convenience these days.

This week Mike turns thirty. His ladyfriend decided to throw him a surprise party, so it was Editor Dan and my job to get him out of the house and to the party at the appropriate time. People were concerned that there would be problems with this, but Dan and I know the way to Mike's heart and it's with the promise of breakfast at the flea market. Even before the party we had a great day of wonderfully gross food, old Buffalo and Ghostbusters metal pins and I got the high score in Galaga. The times were great. Dan and I believe we even wandered into another dimension as we found ourselves in a part of the dirt mall that we had never been to. Finally it was time for the party and we took Mike to the park where everyone else awaited our arrival. I have no idea how he didn't know about it, but the secret held strong. In true Mike fashion he showed no emotion over any of it. That's why we love him.

The party was fun, even though it was about a billion degrees and I got a ridiculous sunburn. We chased a turkey, ate a lot of food and of course drank some drinks. I had a Slurpee earlier on, but when the effects started fading, I decided to go with this strawberry lemonade. We've gotten a handful of comments from people saying that they think the Huberts company is garbage, but we could not disagree more. It tastes like they made lemonade from lemon juice concentrate; you know the stuff that comes in the little plastic lemons. It's nice and sour and tastes like real lemons. I don't know if as a whole it's not sweet enough for those who complained, or maybe it's the extremely faint stevia taste that hides in there. All I can say is those people are wrong and this is great lemonade. The base is great and the extract of strawberry they use makes it taste like someone just mashed the hell out of some berries and put it in their lemonade. I love it. You should love it. You should join us on Tuesday when we ride bikes to a strip club for Mike's birthday to get hot dogs. It's a tradition that we don't go in, just acquire hot dogs from the cart outside. Does anything else scream, “Welcome to your Thirties!” more?

One thing I would like to do before I die is chop a pineapple down from a tree and eat it. I guess I could have someone more skilled get it down for me but I want it inside of me no more than two minutes after it came down from the tree. That's a fresh pineapple. I want it. I don't think that's a dramatic request. I can catch it, even though I am aware it might hurt me. It's like a slightly spikey, oddly shaped football. I love pineapple, though and want a fresh one. No more of this out of season garbage. Fresh, son.

This pop, although probably distant from a fresh pineapple, tastes a lot like pineapple. Not quite carbonated pineapple juice, but close. It's very sweet. You should not drink this alone. It's not destructive in its calories content at a pretty standard 120, but it is sweet, man.

Who knows, a fresh pineapple might not be that far away. I don't have any plans to travel to an exotic paradise any time soon but in the scheme of things, even five years isn't that long to have to wait for hopefully the best pineapple I will ever have in my life.

I can only imagine how sticky the bed of that truck has to be. Driving bottles of iced tea and lemonade all over every day, every week, every month of the year bottles have to break. You also can tell that they do most of their driving on old dirt roads with dust blowing up everywhere. I bet the bed of that there truck is a dirty sticky mess. You know who is winning out with this ice tea leakage? The ants and bees, that's who. The ants are crawling their way up the tires, while the bees just buzz over to feed on the sweetness that is left behind once the glass is cleared away. Those lucky bugs are filling up their stomachs with some of the tastiest summer beverages available in the northeast. When one of these bottles of raspberry tea lemonade busts open it must be like a holiday to them. To start off the raspberry tea is great. Each swig tastes like you sitting on the back of that truck downing a bushel of ripe raspberries while gulping down a big jug of sweetened iced tea to fight the heat. If that tea wasn't enough for you, you are in luck because they cut it right in half with some quality lemonade. It was one a bit on the bitter side, but the sweetness of the tea took care of that and the two flavors now live in perfect harmony, well that is until the ants and bees come along and eat/drink it all up.

Something happened around the turn of the century where people started to give up on bars of soap. Suddenly they weren't good enough for people. Maybe people thought they couldn't get them clean enough or something, either way people left the bars on the shelf and America embraced the new product known as body wash. I am a grown ass man and I will confidently admit that I use body wash. The reason I do is that I have some that smells like red licorice and the aroma is delicious. That really plays no part in this tale though. The important thing here is that the body wash empire got greedy. They were blinded by the new trend and in their minds the entire world would soon turn to their products and bar soap would become obsolete. As a result many of them purchased the ingredients needed to make the wash in obscene surplus. Now that a decade has passed the body wash folk are realizing that they have reached their limit of customers. Those who are not already using their products will cling to their bars of soap until the day they die. The problem was they were stuck with enough warehouses of materials to fill a smaller state, like Rhode Island. Sure they were able to sell the “soap” ingredients to some of the bar companies at a loss, but what to do with the “gel” ingredients? After many late night board meetings a solution was thought up; they would sell the ingredient, which are perfectly safe to consume, to the beverage industry to make drinks with interesting textures.

Vita Lina jumped at the chance to ride the crest of a possible trend of drinks with strange consistencies. They released this line of flaxseed drinks that has a viscosity that falls somewhere between body wash and a normal drink. It doesn't taste soapy in any way, but the texture is there, and it's weird. I personally like it a lot. It's interesting, and I notice that I take smaller sips than normal. A few friends who tried it were not so into it. They couldn't get past the texture to even contemplate the flavor, which has a nice subtle mango quality to it. I can't blame them. Even though I like the consistency, I do find it distracting from the flavor. I feel like I can taste texture in this drink, and since I'm not a robot that is impossible. It says it's a drink, but since there is tea in it, I consider it an iced tea. Truth be told it tastes more like a drink that is not overly sweetened than tea.

It's now time for another installment of how stupid Jay can be with drinks. I took this beverage with me to see some bands play at a house show the other night. Buffalo has a long tradition of house shows, and I'm glad it's still going strong. So there I am watching bands, hanging out with friends and occasionally taking pulls from my juice while most other people are downing beers. I was fine with the juice; it wasn't spectacular but it was exactly what I expected from a cranberry juice that was sweetened with cane sugar. By the end of the show I had drunk about ¾ of the bottle and decided to hold off on the rest until I was home and could resample it to write my review.

Cut to now where I am sitting at my desk about to write a review for some decent cranberry juice. I give it to my ladyfriend so she can give it a little taste, and she says, “Wow that's some sweet pomegranate.” I reply with, “No, no, no it's cranberry not pomegranate.” At which point she simply points at the label and I feel like a complete fool. She was right it is pomegranate and I am once again playing the roll of the idiot. I've often thought that pomegranate and cranberries were closely related in the fruit family tree, but I never would have thought I would have confused them. When I grabbed it out of my fridge that day I had cranberries on my mind, so I thought that is what this was. The inclusion of apple juice in the ingredients helped me along. Everyone's heard of cranapple, but who has ever heard of pomapple? If they want to make a drink that sounds cool they should make a cranagranate. I would buy that on name alone. So yes I thought it was cranberry juice, but as soon as I took a sip after I knew I was wrong, all I could taste was strong, very sweet pom. This is the kind of drink that could get kids into pomegranate. Sure it could benefit from not being made from a concentrate, but that would make it cost way more, and it's only 99 cents, which is rad. At least they used cane sugar and not HFCS.

Everyone knows that carrots help with your eyesight. If you eat enough carrots you can read books in a pitch-black setting, it's a simple fact. What many people don't know that rabbits are the key to even better vision. They consume an insane amount of carrots, and then something happens with their metabolism that creates an enzyme that can cure the blind. The only problem is that the enzyme resides in the rabbit's ears, so they must be removed for the sake of science and in the name of better eye care. Okay, if you believe that, you my “friend” are a moron. In fact, according to the internet, just eating carrots doesn't even help your eye site, you must also do eye exercises. Say goodbye to everything you knew about healthy eating.

I have a tendency not to look at ingredient lists, or descriptive writing on drink bottles until after I drink them. The reason being that I don't want it to affect my review. I want to go in blind. With that in mind I expected this to be mainly carrot juice with mango and blackcurrant juice added. I knew there would be other stuff in there too, but that is what I expected the base to be. With carrots on my mind I took a swig and was pleasantly surprised to find out that it didn't taste like carrots at all. In reality it tastes like a mango orange juice with just a hint of currants. After I contemplated the sip I checked out the ingredients and I was correct, there's not a drop of carrot juice is present. It is all white grape, pear, orange, mango and blackcurrant juice with a whole mess of other “eye” ingredients. It tastes pretty great as a juice. I would never expect that it had such ocular benefits from the flavor. I would have just taken it as a juice.

This is one of those rare occasions that I should have read the ingredients before I drank it. You see this drink contains fish oil, a no-no for a vegetarian such as myself. If you have similar dietary restrictions I would stay away, but if not try it out and give your eyes some love.

Ps. The companies name on the packaging looks like a nose and two eyes. I hope that was intentional.